Nuruddin Farah's career offers a stunning dramatization of how the troubled processes of globalization and postcolonialism coincide with the local politics of language and tradition. Farah's intimate knowledge of the cultural and linguistic intricacies of postcolonial and neocolonial Africa comes by way of a complex and fascinating personal history. As a novelist and scholar, he has traveled the world, spending time in countless international locales and nearly a dozen African nations. For most of his career, he has been an author in exile, writing from afar about the political turmoil and cultural violence of his native Somalia. Farah's approach has consistently been vividly historical and trenchantly non‐partisan, carefully avoiding the dogmatic orthodoxies of both the Left and the Right. In Farah's words, “The only thing one can do is to be aware and to struggle harder and harder against repression in whatever form it comes” (Moss 1828).